[MUD-Dev] Declaration of the Rights of Avatars

[Raph Koster]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: mud-dev-admin at kanga.nu [mailto:mud-dev-admin at kanga.nu]On Behalf Of
> Jeff Freeman
> Sent: Monday, April 17, 2000 9:04 AM
> To: mud-dev at kanga.nu
> Subject: RE: [MUD-Dev] Declaration of the Rights of Avatars
>
>
> Raph wrote:
> >- why do you want freedom to do things that are BAD admin or business
> >practice? (even considering that "freedom" and so on are total mirages in
> >this whole situation...)
>
> Why, because what 99% of the players think is a BAD admin
> decision, I might think is a good one.

If 99% of the players think it's a bad one strongly enough, it's arguably a
bad decision regardless of what you think. ;) Certainly you felt that way
often enough about UO! *grin*

Seriously, though--adminning is often a game of compromises. Sometimes you
make decisions that go against what you believe to be right in part because
you want to retain an audience, keep your players happy, etc. This seems to
happen even on those muds that don't really care about audience size,
etc--stuff sometimes happens or decisions get made to just to keep the
players happy.

> But, I have to agree with Matt... the whole thing seems to start off on
the
> wrong foot, pre-supposing that "all men are created equal" which of
course,
> they aren't.  Its as if a Constitution were written and included
> the rights and responsibilities of God Almighty.  What do you do if God
> Almighty shows up, gives it the once over and says, "Er... No."?

Who knows? Who cares? A lot of the commentary on this hypothetical document
centers around a couple of points:

- a bunch of people don't believe in rights. Many question who grants them,
whether they are derived from the community or from the admin or from a
Creator or whatever. I submit that this is a pointless debate: in terms of
muds, the admin grants them or denies them, regardless of whether they
previously exist because of a particular philosophical bent. The issue has
to be whether the admins SHOULD grant these rights.

- admins, as a whole, don't want to think players have any rights
whatsoever. Given that this is a group of almost exclusively admins talking
here, perhaps this is not surprising. Are there any people who are just
players out there who'd like to give their take on this issue? :)

- the reasons offered for not granting them seem to boil down to:

  - this is a game, there's a bunch of oddities that mess with rights in a
game.
  - this is my mud to run as I see fit. Caveat emptor, players.
  - this restricts me too much in adminning the mud; I usually grant them
though.

1) I suspect is distraction from the actual issue. 2) and 3) are more
interesting.

We keep discussing 2) from only one perspective: presupposing that it is
indeed the creator's mud and that it is their right to do anything they want
unless they choose to surrender power and authority voluntarily. Can we
attack it from the other angle (unelss it's too alien to everyone's
thinking)? By what logic a mud admin assume that the act of setting up or
running a mud gives them control over what occurs within it? Again, as a
thought experiment. :)

As far as 3), it seems to be a case of "I want an escape hatch." Can we
build hypothetical situations where said escape hatch would even be needed,
beyond the ones already built into the document?

-Raph




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